Since its very inception, Microsoft has held that cash for code is king. But the company is slowly, grudgingly, and cautiously treading into Open Source. Here’s a look at the “Gates Public License.”
For three decades, the executive leadership at Microsoft Corporation has maintained a firm consensus on how to encourage innovative software development: you pay for it. User feedback, while helpful, is simply no match for the mighty dollar. Cash for code is king.
“Who can afford to do professional work for nothing?” asked Microsoft founder Bill Gates rhetorically in a 1976 missive framing Microsoft’s worldview. Titled, “An Open Letter to Hobbyists” (see the sidebar of the same name to read the original letter in its entirety), the essay was, in essence, a cease and desist letter aimed at Altair aficionados who, according to Gates, were guilty of purloining Microsoft source code without paying for it. “Most directly, the thing you do is theft,” wrote Gates.
An Open Letter to Hobbyists
To me, the most critical thing in the hobby market right now is the lack of good software courses, books and software itself. Without good software and an owner who understands programming, a hobby computer is wasted. Will quality software be written for the hobby market?
Almost a year ago, Paul Allen and myself, expecting the hobby market to expand, hired Monte Davidoff and developed Altair BASIC. Though the initial work took only two months, the three of us have spent most of the last year documenting, improving, and adding features to BASIC. Now we have 4K, 8K, EXTENDED, ROM, and DISK BASIC. The value of the computer time we have used exceeds $40,000.
The feedback we have gotten from the hundreds of people who say they are using BASIC has all been positive. Two surprising things are apparent, however: most of these “users” never bought BASIC (less than 10% of all Altair owners have bought BASIC), and the amount of royalties we have received from sales to hobbyists makes the time spent on Altair BASIC worth less than $2 an hour.
Why is this? As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software. Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share. Who cares if the people who worked on it get paid?
Is this fair? One thing you don’t do by stealing software is get back at MITS for some problem you may have had. MITS doesn’t make money selling software. The royalty paid to us, the manual, the tap,e and the overhead make it a break-even operation. One thing you do do is prevent good software from being written. Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put three-man years into programming, finding all bugs[ and] documenting his product, and distribute for free? The fact is, no one besides us has invested a lot of money in hobby software. We have written 6800 BASIC, and are writing 8080 APL and 6800 APL, but there is very little incentive to make this software available to hobbyists. Most directly, the thing you do is theft.
What about the guys who re-sell Altair BASIC, aren’t they making money on hobby software? Yes, but those who have been reported to us may lose in the end. They are the ones who give hobbyists a bad name, and should be kicked out of any club meeting they show up at.
I would appreciate letters from any one who wants to pay up, or has a suggestion or comment. Just write to me at 1180 Alvarado SE,# 114, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 87108. Nothing would please me more than being able to hire ten programmers and deluge the hobby market with good software.
Bill Gates General Partner, Micro-Soft[ sic] February 3, 1976
But twenty-nine years later, a significant challenge to Gates’s argument has emerged in the form of the Open Source Software movement. The basic tenets of the movement equate the right to view and modify a software program’s underlying source code with the right to speak freely and the right to trade legal goods in an unfettered marketplace. Furthermore, the tenets hold that these rights are inalienable.
Where some corporations have come around to this argument, sensing the business opportunities and production efficiencies in such a worldview (see “Taking Open Source to the Bank, http://www.linux-mag.com/2004-09/bank_01.html, for example), Microsoft, for its part, has dutifully played the heavy. It has released its operating systems and applications under the strictest intellectual property ownership terms possible, relaxing those terms (however slightly) only at the behest of large, enterprise customers. Further, Microsoft has used its media muscle to brand the free software development model as fundamentally untrustworthy. In a 2001 interview with the Chicago Sun Times, Microsoft president Steve Ballmer went so far as to label Linux, the most notable free software alternative to the Windows operating system, “a cancer,” noting that any contribution the Linux kernel and its outlying elements becomes a de facto portion of the public commons under the terms of the copyright mechanism governing most of the code, the GNU General Public License.
Ballmer Dons a Red Hat
Such animosity doesn’t disappear overnight, but when a company’s shareholder value drops 40 percent — as Microsoft’s has in the last four years — new ideas start to work their way up the corporate pyramid. In the last eighteen months, Microsoft’s outspoken opposition to Linux has diminished, replaced by growing talk of collaboration, “bridges,” and an eagerness to look beyond the Microsoft proprietary development model as the company searches out new marketing pastures.
This April, less than six months after warning Asian executives at a Singapore forum that Linux violates more than 228 patents, CEO Ballmer was in Las Vegas showing American executives at the Microsoft Management Summit how to run Red Hat Enterprise Linux aboard its Virtual Server 2005 service pack.
“As much as that hurts my eyes,” quipped Ballmer, “I know that is an important capability for the Virtual Server technology for our customers.”
Clever gambit or philosophical turnaround? The truth, says Stephen Walli, a former Microsoft business development manager and unabashed open source advocate during his days with the company, most definitely lies somewhere in between.
“Microsoft is a typical large corporation,” says Walli, now vice president of open source development with the Cambridge, Massachusetts consulting firm Optaros, Inc. “You’ve got lots of levels of managers, lots of people who are very successful, and lots of people that are very protective of the business model that made them successful.”
At the same time, Walli adds, you’ve got year after year of computer science and business school graduates who trained to appreciate the good side of open platforms, open networks and open opportunities. While not exactly a vinegar and oil-type combination, the resulting mixture has caused a subtle shift in corporate chemistry and, if current trends hold true, corporate strategy as well.
Walli holds up his own personal experience as a key example. A founder of Softway Systems, a company that set out to add a POSIX- compliant layer to Windows NT, thus making it possible to run Unix applications on Windows machines, Walli found himself suddenly an employee of Microsoft when the company chose to buy out Softway in 1999. For two years, Walli continued working as product unit manager. In 2001, however, he was transferred over to Microsoft’s Shared Source Common Language Infrastructure (code-named “Rotor”) to help make the company’s .NET framework more compatible with non-Windows systems, such as FreeBSD and Mac OS X. It was here, Walli says, that his business experience juggling various source code licenses proved helpful as the company gingerly applied the tactics of collaborative development. When executives fretted about surrendering 100 percent technology ownership, lamenting the loss of both revenue and control that resulted, Walli had a ready argument.
“I said, ‘Look, Microsoft is a $30 billion company. Unless the business you’re expecting to build off this technology is going to make you half a billion a year, you’ll never even give it approved. Why not just give it away?’”
WiX Sticks
Not every argument ended in Walli’s favor, but in late 2003, a software candidate for unrestricted release finally emerged. An XML- based Windows installation toolset known as WiX (http://sourceforge.net/projects/wix/), the project belonged to Rob Mensching, a Microsoft developer who had started working on it back in 1999.
“I was looking for a project to learn more about what could be done with XML,” writes Mensching via email. “It was quickly clear to me that I could use XML as the language for my compiler and linker. A couple weekends later, the first version of the Windows Installer XML toolset was working.”
Mensching says he managed WiX development as if it were an open source project within Microsoft in an attempt to foster collaboration and integrate installer development into the overall Windows development process. When it finally reached the point where Mensching felt the software was useful enough for developers outside the company, he began to investigate licensing options. The investigation put him in touch with Walli and other sympathetic executives who floated WiX as an open source trial balloon.
“We just had to get the appropriate buy-off,” says Mensching.
That would arrive in the spring of 2004. On April 5, 2004, Microsoft released WiX under the Common Public License (CPL, http://www.opensource.org/licenses/cpl1.0.php), a license first developed by IBM for its own open source projects. Endorsed by the Open Source Initiative, the CPL authorizes modifications and even relicensing on the condition that derivative versions make their source code available in some publicly-accessible format.
Mensching says the total number of WiX contributors has since grown from three to fifteen with an additional twenty individuals who answer questions, supply feedback, and support a mailing list that currently tops 300 members. Like many open source projects, WiX has its own page on Source Forge and ranks in the upper tenth percentile in terms of all-time activity.
“We are still a young community that has plenty of growth in it,” Mensching says. “Swing by next year. I think we’ll still be growing.”
From a Drip to a Drizzle
Since releasing WiX, Microsoft has added two additional CPL projects, the Windows Template Library (http://sourceforge.net/projects/wtl), and FlexWiki (http://www.flexwiki.com/), a collaborative publishing tool. Designed by David Ornstein and is based on the WikiWikiWeb concept pioneered by the Portland Pattern Repository (a mid-1990s project whose founder, Ward Cunningham, now happens to be a Microsoft employee), FlexWiki runs atop the. NET platform and includes an integrated object-oriented programming language known as WikiTalk that can be used to add dynamic features in addition to text to online wiki pages.
Of course, such offerings are a long way from publishing the “crown jewels” of the Microsoft empire — tools such as Microsoft Outlook, Excel, and Word, not to mention the well-guarded code beneath the programming interfaces that allow a third party program to run seamlessly atop Windows. Still, as Walli is quick to point out, Microsoft’s own 30-year track record of buying up promising technologies and buying out potential rivals has left it with a Gordian Knot-sized intellectual property dilemma. There’s also the small matter of Microsoft’s customers, many of whom have been trained by Microsoft’s own marketing to view open source software as risky.
Imagine Bill Gates wakes up tomorrow and decides Microsoft will share the code of the entire Windows code base under a truly freedom-loving open license. How much hesitation in buying will occur, reflected in a temporary downturn in revenue for a few quarters, while the company works out the kinks of open sourcing a product base of 50M+lines of code? 10 percent? 15 percent? At what point does the market take action and do Microsoft’s shareholders revolt?
A smarter strategy, says Walli, would be to follow the model of German software giant SAP, a company which in 2000 acquired rights to build its own database management system, SAP DB, atop the old Nixdorf platform Adabas D. Because it wasn’t part of SAP’s core enterprise offerings, SAP had the freedom to license SAP DB under the GPL, all but cementing their work and all subsequent improvements into the public commons. Just as the first round of changes flowed in, the company struck a deal with MySQL AB to have the Swedish open source company manage the project. MySQL has since renamed the product Max DB.
In the meantime, Oracle, the leading proprietary database vendor and SAP’s biggest competitor in the lucrative enterprise resource planning software marketplace, has yet to put a dent in SAP’s global market share even with the recent acquisition of Peoplesoft.
“When I was at Microsoft, everybody was asking the same thing, ‘Why the GPL?’’” says Walli. “Think about it. You’re giving the product away for free. Right now free software in Germany is a hot topic. Here you have the preeminent German company paying taxes, selling software, and doing free software all at the same time. Throw on the GPL and you have salted the field around your technology.”
Seeing the Light?
Such defensive thinking might explain the recent warming trend at Microsoft. In April, Brad Smith, acknowledged a “broad panoply of development models” and an overall need for “bridges” and “a rotation” between various sectors of the software development community. A month later, Gates, in a CNET interview (http://tb.news.com/tb.cgi/2008-1016_3-5701477), commented on the company’s evolving “dialogue” with Linux developers amid an overall discussion of the mobile handset marketplace, a place where Nokia, not Microsoft, qualifies as the 800-pound gorilla and open source developers have developed significant inroads with Chinese cell phone manufacturers
“We’ll be in touch with all those people,” said Gates of the open source competition, “as well as competing against them in the marketplace,” Gates said.
Finally, there was the belated report, also on CNET, of a March dinner date between Microsoft chief Steve Ballmer and Red Hat counterpart Matthew Szulik. Although Red Hat executives refused to acknowledge the meeting, Red Hat Chief Technology Officer Michael Tiemann, who also doubles as the president of the nonprofit Open Source Initiative, noted in a June eWeek interview that he had been approached by Microsoft representatives looking to build a relationship with that organization as well.
“They basically said they wanted to begin a productive conversation,” Tiemann told the magazine.
Tiemann declined an opportunity to elaborate on his June speculation when contacted for this story, but subsequent media coverage of Microsoft has indicated a growing willingness on the part of the company to make its applications more interoperable with Linux. In a July article distributed by the IDG News Service and published in PCWorld, Microsoft director of platform strategy Bill Hilf waved off the growing number of “conspiracy theories” on the Internet that suggest a pending “Microsoft Linux” distribution or similar attempt to “embrace and extend” the platform. At the same time, Hilf, a former IBM executive in charge of Linux strategy, said alternate theories that Microsoft executives automatically recoil from all things Linux-related were equally mistaken. One of the biggest surprises of his first year’s tenure at Microsoft, Hilf told IDG News Service, was the degree of openness to open source innovation.
“Polarization is starting to be less and less,” Hilf said.
Meanwhile, Eric Raymond, a co-founder OSI, is one of many open source community members waiting for the other shoe to drop. The man who posted the original Halloween Documents revealing internal Microsoft concern over Linux as an unprecedented competitor in the operating system marketplace considers the media chatter hinting at overtures to Red Hat and a maturing acceptance of the GPL in certain situations as “just the usual twitching.” So far, the company has showed no signs of including its crown jewels, Windows and the operating system internals that give Microsoft-owned applications better command of the operating system, in the current display of corporate glasnost.
“We will know there has been a significant change in attitude when they put down the patent weapon or when they start as a routine matter releasing documentation on their protocols and file formats under terms that allow open source projects to use them,” Raymond says.
Microsoft Shared Source Manager Jason Matusow echoes Raymond’s comments in a way. Having overseen the company’s third party developer collaboration program since it was first unveiled four years ago, he sees no major changes in attitude or sentiment when it comes to source code policy.
“Certainly when we started, there was a need-to-walk-before-you-can-run scenario,” Matusow says, “[ But] the idea has always been to listen carefully to our customers and partners and to hear their feedback on how they would like to see transparency increased.”
If anything, Matusow sees Microsoft further sharpening its ‘full spectrum’ approach to software development. When you’re the world’s largest software vendor, commitments vary. Rather than view its customer base as a uniform entity, Microsoft has chosen to tailor its intellectual property strategy in a way that ensures maximum collaboration, while at the same time retaining as many ownership rights as possible.
Free software purists might sniff at this take-it-or-leave-it approach, says Matusow, but viewed from a legal perspective, it’s no different than the line-item licensing approach allowed by the Creative Commons (http://creativecommons.org/) or the enterprise service restrictions imposed by open source vendors.
Matusow cites Red Hat as an example. “Sure, they use the GPL,” he says. “But Red Hat support contracts say you can’t modify the source code. That’s because the company wants its offering to have commercial value and that in turn requires restrictions.”
Red Hat representatives didn’t respond to a request for comment, but a copy of the Red Hat Subscription Agreement available online does reveal a clause stating that customers who make softare changes that break “binary compatibility” or prohibit the functioning of system components without Red Hat authorization face disqualification of subscriber status.
Such compromises are simply the cost of doing business in a corporate world, says Matusow. For Red Hat, the compromise amounts to putting a few checks on the liberties granted by the GPL to insure better service and software reliability. For Microsoft, the compromise amounts to putting a limit on the amount of control Microsoft will have over software products and platforms so as to insure better adoption rates and developer community buy-in.
“People are trying to find a balance between giving stuff away and holding it back,” says Matusow. “Everybody’s trying to look across the industry and see where the opportunities are.”
Sam Williams covers business and software technology for a number of publications and is is a regular contributor to Linux Magazine. He is the author of two books, “Arguing A.I.” and “Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman’s Free Software Crusade.”
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